Land conservation is climate action

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt of the speech delivered by Land Trust Alliance President and CEO Andrew Bowman at Rally: The National Land Conservation Conference in Portland, Oregon, on Sept. 7, 2023. The text here has been edited for print – watch the full video below.

Climate change is here now, and the prospects of the world staying below critical temperature thresholds are diminishing rapidly. It is time to aggressively implement an “all of the above” strategy when it comes to available options for climate change mitigation. The importance of the land sector delivering all it can in this context has never been more urgent.

Let’s examine the role that land conservation can play in mitigating climate change, both by preventing the conversion of intact forests, grasslands and wetlands, and through land management practices such as reforestation and active soil management on working lands. A seminal 2018 study published in Science Advances and led by Nature Conservancy scientists found that natural climate solutions deployed at a national level could prevent or sequester more than one-fifth of annual U.S. greenhouse gas pollution. That’s the equivalent of the pollution from approximately 263 million vehicles. And some scientists, NGOs and government agencies argue that the potential for natural climate solutions in the U.S. is actually closer to a third of annual greenhouse gas pollution.

Land trusts alone won’t achieve that full potential, but they — and private land conservation writ large — are essential pieces of the puzzle just as they are essential to bold land-based goals like 30x30. Think of it this way: Your conservation efforts ensure that there are open lands where natural climate solutions can play out and be implemented. Your work not only ensures that our nation takes full advantage of the opportunities offered by natural climate solutions, but every project demonstrates the many benefits of conservation, helping to raise the profile of and help garner support for this important climate mitigation strategy.

Our nation cannot focus only on maintaining and enhancing carbon sinks on public lands or reducing emissions resulting from how public lands are managed. A vast amount of privately-owned and managed land in the U.S. will need to provide natural climate solutions, and land trusts will be essential in making that happen through their partnerships with private landowners.

Importantly, the beauty of natural climate solutions goes beyond the size of their potential climate impact. Compared to other options for emission reductions, natural climate solutions are inexpensive and they provide numerous co-benefits such as clean air and water, healthy soils and wildlife habitat that can alleviate the worsening biodiversity crisis. And they provide places for people to recreate, hunt, fish and grow food. Stated another way, instead of requiring personal sacrifices, natural climate solutions reward us in multiple ways that improve the quality of our lives. And there is no need to wait for technological innovations to take advantage of natural climate solutions. In fact, photosynthesis is the only proven “technology” that is affordable and can be deployed today at-scale to remove carbon from the atmosphere and buy time for us to fully deploy other mitigation strategies.

The fact is that our community — and each of us as practicing conservationists — is exceptionally fortunate to have at our disposal the tools to make a significant, measurable contribution to climate change mitigation today. We also offer an antidote to the climate despair that many people increasingly feel, and we can readily demonstrate that our work also builds community resilience to the worsening impacts of climate change. How many other professionals and communities of practice have this much to offer to society? The short and correct answer is: None.

Yet most people and policymakers are unaware of what natural climate solutions are, what their potential is, and that they are an essential, nonnegotiable part of tackling climate change. A 2022 report from the White House, titled “Opportunities to Accelerate Nature-Based Solutions: A Roadmap for Climate Progress, Thriving Nature, Equity, & Prosperity,” acknowledged this problem: “Many decision makers, communities, and experts lack awareness of nature-based solutions and the ways they can help address social and economic challenges. As a result, these options are often overlooked.”

The problem lies in the fact that, when natural climate solutions are acknowledged in climate change discussions, they are often treated as an afterthought, a nice-to-have complement to other mitigation strategies, or a footnote to rosy climate change forecasts premised on industrial-scale carbon removal technologies that are nonexistent, energy-intensive and/or prohibitively expensive. This lack of acknowledgement of and respect for natural climate solutions has to change and we all must play a role in making that change.

Fortunately, in my role as president and CEO of the Alliance, I’ve had the opportunity over the last 18 months to press for exactly that kind of change.

Since early 2022, the Alliance has participated in a group dialogue co-convened by Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment, the Solar Energy Industries Association and The Nature Conservancy. This ambitious effort brought together representatives of the U.S. solar industry, land conservation and environmental NGOs, tribal nations, agricultural interests, environmental justice groups and government agencies.

The stated goal of this Solar Uncommon Dialogue is to explore the potential to accelerate the deployment of large-scale solar power to achieve critical climate objectives, while simultaneously addressing conservation and community opportunities and challenges. In addition to finding a way to help quickly decarbonize the nation’s electricity supply, my objective in participating in the process was to trigger a shift in thinking about the land conservation community as an impediment to large-scale solar — or an interest group to be assuaged and neutralized — to thinking instead of conservation as a means of pursuing and providing a similar level of climate change mitigation. In my view, if the primary motivation of the participants in the Solar Uncommon Dialogue is to avoid catastrophic climate change, they should want to put their collective strength behind a bold land conservation agenda as well as an agenda focused on the buildout of large-scale solar infrastructure.

I want to express my deep appreciation to The Nature Conservancy for its leadership in co-convening this process and for all the work it has done for more than a decade to help direct energy development away from high-value natural and agricultural lands, while simultaneously facing the realities that energy development will occur, and renewable energy must be deployed at scale to mitigate climate change. If you haven’t had a chance to review the Conservancy’s “Power of Place” report, released this past May, I highly recommend it. It provides a vision for how the nation can build the clean energy infrastructure needed for economy-wide, net-zero emissions by 2050 while avoiding most impacts to sensitive natural and working lands. The report states that, under status quo development practices, the deployment of wind and solar would require over 250,000 square miles, which is an area larger than the state of Texas. Under the impact reduction scenario that the report describes — which involves careful energy planning and “land-saving” methods of infrastructure buildout — the nation can reduce that figure by 115,000 square miles, which is an area the size of Arizona.

The “Power of Place” report and the Solar Uncommon Dialogue are particularly timely given how quickly the nation is transitioning to renewable power, fueled in significant part by new federal incentives and spending. Perhaps you are seeing large solar arrays and wind turbines sprouting up in landscapes you have worked for years to conserve. And perhaps you’re witnessing groups and interests that were formerly aligned in their energy and climate advocacy efforts beginning to be at loggerheads.

In October, the participants in the Solar Uncommon Dialogue released a landmark agreement to work together to find a path forward for the buildout of large-scale solar power. Importantly, based on our advocacy efforts, the wording of the agreement has improved markedly since the beginning of the process regarding both natural climate solutions and respect for lands already in conservation status.

It wasn’t easy getting to this point. We had to educate the participants about natural climate solutions and assert to a skeptical audience that those solutions are just as important in solving the climate mitigation puzzle as solar power. I encountered impatience and even disbelief from some participants that I would make arguments about natural climate solutions and distract from an exclusive focus on solar power. And many participants clearly felt that discussions in any context about bringing natural climate solutions to scale are a luxury we can’t afford given the pressing nature of the climate crisis. All of this demonstrates what we’re up against.

Now that a final agreement has been reached in the first phase of the Solar Uncommon Dialogue process, the real work will begin. There will be several working groups that dive deeply into critical areas, including the creation of a decision-making framework and related best practices to guide the siting of large-scale solar projects. The Alliance will be there to represent you in this next phase and I will approach a number of land trust leaders with energy-siting experience to ask them to participate in the various working groups. Together, we will make the most of this process and ensure that success will be measured by how land conservation is truly advanced rather than settling only for assurances that conservation objectives won’t be harmed or impeded more than necessary as solar power is deployed. Likewise, together, we will demonstrate our desire and skill in finding a path forward such that the nation does, in fact, decarbonize its electrical supply quickly through the large-scale deployment of renewable energy.

Allow me to build on this last point a bit more: It is essential that our community be perceived as constructive rather than obstreperous when it comes to renewable energy. We do not want the word NIMBY attached to us or BANANA, which stands for “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.” And we must do all we can to avoid having conservation and renewable energy interests pitted against each other. There are darker forces out there that would love to see such a standoff.

Andrew J. Bowman is president and CEO of the Land Trust Alliance.